As global cultivated land decreases each year, crop yield is difficult to sustain human development. Although per mu yield of food crop is increasing, total output is difficult to maintain growth momentum. According to the report published by FAO, the world faces a big food crisis. Breed improvement of some main food crops and oil crops is extremely urgent.
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the important food crops in the world, more than half the world's population, including almost all of East and Southeast Asia, depends on rice as its principal staple food. Increasing rice yield is therefore significant for solving the problem of food security in the world. In general, direct factors affecting rice yield mainly include grain weight, grain number per spike, panicles per plant (similar to tillering number per plant), seed setting rate aspects. In addition, indirect factors such as plant height and tillering are also included. Thus, promoting increase in rice yield by changing these factors has broad application foreground in modern agricultural production.
Performing breed improvement by using biotechnology has gradually replaced traditional breeding, becoming a method for obtaining crops with high yield and good quality as well as economic crops, etc. Therefore, finding those acting genes for regulating plant related traits becomes the important premise for increasing crop yield by using biotechnology.
Consequently, the need for further developing new approaches applied to modify plants and make plants high-yielding is urgent in the field, so as to achieve directed improvement of plants such as crops, economic crops and flowers, and obtain new varieties of plants suitable for people's needs.